Human activities in distributed BPM

Abstract

The general concept of inter-workflow system communications has been proposed by the WfMC in 1995. However, there has been little study or use case on general inter-workflow system communications, except for business massage exchange-based protocols. Since BPEL allows a local system to invoke remote BPEL Processes via Web Service interface, this can be used as a mechanism for inter-workflow communications for BPEL Processes. Currently, however, it causes a problem if the remote BPEL Processes use BPEL4Peole extension and include People Activities and Human Tasks. This is because BPEL4People has not anticipated Processes to be called remotely and there is no provision for the remote invocation of the user interfaces. This paper studies a possible mechanism in which a local system can invoke a remote BPEL Process with Human Tasks and let local users perform human activities via user interfaces that are defined in the remote Human Tasks.